


Give and Take

by argle_fraster



Category: Final Fantasy IV
Genre: Dark Knight Meta, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-23
Updated: 2012-10-23
Packaged: 2017-11-16 21:36:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/544083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/argle_fraster/pseuds/argle_fraster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The things that haunted him as a Dark Knight are gone once he reaches the summit of Mt. Ordeals.</p><p>[October: gen month, Chocobo Races 2012, Team Ramuh]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Give and Take

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lorenleah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorenleah/gifts).



> Written for the prompt: Cecil. Being a Dark Knight, becoming a Paladin, his worries, his fears, his angst, his relationship with Golbez/Kain/King Baron/Rosa/anybody. I want to see something that really gets inside his head, whether that means lone introspection or interacting with cast members. I'm particularly interested in his time as a Dark Knight and how going down that path affected him (possibly contrasted with how being a Dragoon affected Kain?).

At night, he sees red.

It comes slowly, at first - bits of things he shouldn't know, bled down from the sword resting across his room. Cecil sees people dying that he's never known alive, and it rattles him so bad that he usually can't go back to sleep in the morning. He spends the worst of the nights awake, sitting and staring across the blackness to the sword he knows is sitting there. It never does anything, and he thinks that might be the worst part of it.

He sees them in their final moments, just before they die, just before the sword draws a high arc in their blood and the red paints the stones. Pieces of their souls are etched into the hilt; he feels them there, shuddering, waiting for a release that will never come, when he's out sparring with the others during practice.

He thinks this is his penance, for wielding the sword in the first place. This is what being a Dark Knight means: holding all the shattered edges of lives broken in your hands and pushing them deeper, until your own blood mingles with the existing stains.

\--

Cecil is so used to the nightmares that it is the sharp _absence_ of them that jolts him from reality once more. He wakes the first morning on the descent back down from the summit of Mt. Ordeals after having no black-shadowed visions throughout the night. He wonders what it says about him that not having them, not seeing the shredded throats and hearing the last, gurgled breaths, is more jarring than it was before.

"And now you know," the Elder of Mysidia says, when they return to town so that Cecil can be fully blessed and accepted by the council, resolved of the sins he'll carry forever on his shoulders. "It would have gutted you, eventually. Taken away your soul. That's what the Dark Sword does - it consumes, even the one who wields it."

Cecil doesn't answer, because he doesn't know how. The Light on the summit had unnerved him as badly as the Dark Sword had, and he wonders, in the back of his mind, what being a Paladin is eking from his soul instead.


End file.
